Why The Flash Killed Off That Character Last Night

Tuesday night’s “Back to Normal” brought The Flash to Earth-2 for a while to check in on Hunter Zolo-Zoom and his adored captive Caitlin, and while his long-term intentions for her are still somewhat murky, he certainly wasn’t cryptic about his feelings towards her dimensional double Killer Frost. After we got to watch actress Danielle Panabaker complain about her characters’ moms to herself, the icy villain made a threatening move on Caitlin and Zoom didn’t let her live to regret it. Here’s why that somewhat surprising murder occurred, according to executive producer Andrew Kreisberg.

We loved what Danielle did with her, so when we were designing this episode and we had Zoom kidnap Caitlin, it just seemed like a fun thing to do to be able to have the two of them together and to have Caitlin actually experience time with her. It gave us an opportunity to sort of deepen both characters. But ultimately, she had to go. [Laughs] No, I mean, like even she said, the only reason he kept her alive, the only reason he had to keep her alive was she was a living remembrance of him caring about Caitlin.

Kreisberg’s explanation, via IGN, is solid, since it’s hard to justify keeping a character around after their central purpose is no longer necessary to carry the plot forward. I mean, Killer Frost is representative of Caitlin in a vague physical way, since it’s the same actress, but their features don’t match up and their personalities are wildly different. It’s like trying to use a pitchfork to eat instead of a regular fork (or possibly not). With Caitlin there now, Zoom doesn’t really have any reason at all to continue putting up with Frost’s griping. He could have just let her go and made her pinky swear not to get in his way again, but killing her was probably the right way to go in that instance.

It was nice just to get her back for a little while after she’d seemingly had her only time to shine earlier this season. I’m not sure that we’ll be missing any huge future plotlines due to her being dead, though, so if there was any semi-regular character that needed to get shanked, it’s okay that Killer Frost was the victim.

And hey, who’s to say that Harry’s intention to create another particle accelerator explosion won’t turn Caitlin into Killer Frost on Earth-1, right? Or maybe there’s some ridiculous way for the show to reveal the Man in the Mask was really Killer Frost all along. Crazier things have happened on this show.

More deaths and weird doppelgänger moments are presumably on the way as The Flash heads into the final stretch of Season 2 on The CW on Tuesday nights at 8 p.m. ET.